Tuesday, January 17, 2017

In France, where the unemployment rate is chronically fixed
at around 10%, the Socialist government has found a new way to interfere in the
marketplace. It has just decreed “a right to disconnect.” All workers now have
the right to ignore company emails when they are not on the job.

It will give them more time to connect with their friends on
Facebook and to frequent Pornhub. Leave it to the French.

Do you think that the right to disconnect will make the economy run
more efficiently? Will it help businesses to coordinate their activities? What happens when something goes
wrong while everyone is off enjoying their leisure?

As it happens, this “right” is really an obligation. You do
not have the right to do otherwise than to obey the diktat. You didn't think that this was about freedom, did you? NPR describes it:

Companies
with more than 50 employees will be obligated to set up hours — normally during
the evening and weekend — when staff are not to send or respond to emails.

Call it the incommunicado rule; no one is allowed to
communicate about any business matter outside of business hours. We await
information about whether or not employees are allowed to use the telephone to
call each other. Also, how can anyone enforce this law? What happens if people
use private email accounts? Will this law function like a French tax system that
has made evading taxes into a national sport?

I do not need to tell you that the well-intentioned French
are basing the law on the fact that all of those extra emails cause stress. And
we cannot have that. No one seems to care whether a company will be running
more efficiently and effectively and whether it will be more competitive in the
world market when everyone is tuned out for most of the
week. What if your international competitors are not as dumb as you? What if
they work more hours and are always available when something goes wrong? How
will this law contribute to competitiveness?

Obviously, it’s a dumb idea. It comes to us from a nation
that prides itself on its ideas. Like the compulsory 35 hour work week.
According to that law you do not have the right to work more than 35 hours a
week. The reasoning was simple: if you
work fewer hours your company will have to hire more people to do the job. Thus
employment will increase.

Unfortunately, the policy has done nothing to move the
unemployment rate… largely because it is simply too expensive to hire people
and France. And once you do hire them it’s nearly impossible to fire them.
French workers have been marching in the streets against changes—proposed by
Socialist government—that would make it easier to fire workers.

The net effect of all this well-intentioned meddling in the
marketplace is that the best and the brightest of France’s young people
have moved to London. Where they do not have a 35
hour work week, where they do not have rules for using email after hours, and
where the bureaucracy and the tax code are vastly more congenial. Literally
hundreds of thousands of the most capable French young people are now living in
London.

The other consequence is that the man who is most likely to
become the next president of France, Francois Fillon, is running as a
Thatcherite conservative… what the French, with customary Gallic contempt… call
a neoliberal.

Now, Grant Cardone writes on CNBC that the French government
has turned its citizens into a nation of slackers. It has bought the concept of
work/life balance, and has used it to undermine business and to compromise
everyone’s prospect for career advancement.

After all, work/life balance is sucker bait. It will be the
epitaph on the tombstone of no small number of dead careers.

Besides, Cardone points out, if you have a middle class
income you do not need work/life balance. You need more money. You do not need
comfort. You need financial freedom. Leave it to the business press to speak a
truth that everyone can understand.

One must note that the concept of work/life balance was
designed to get men out of the marketplace and into the home, where they can
help with housework. It’s another scheme to equalize the tasks performed by men
and women. The right to disconnect will not only undermine a man’s career
prospects and cause his company to run less efficiently. It will
make him a better homemaker. No one ever says this, but we are among friends…
right?

As for the burnout that the French fear, Cardone suggests
that people burn out because they have found no purpose in their work. One
might add that they might feel burned out because they have been deprived of
their freedom to choose when to work and not to work. All of that government interference,
all of those great vacations, it demoralizes you. I need not mention that
France offers the most generous vacation package of any nation. It prides
itself on its ability to enjoy leisure, not on its ability to be productive. If
that does not depress you, nothing will.

You do better to stop thinking about how many hours you can
take off from work, Cardone adds. You should think of what you can contribute
and, I would add, how you can gain pride from being part of a good business.

In the old days they used to call it “sloth.” Today we are
less theologically inclined and call it: laziness. To Cardone, that is the
bottom line. The French are lazy.

Laziness
is an entitlement concept accepted by the middle class that crushes any chance
you have of greatness.

The French have just legislated laziness as a right. Apparently the 35 hours
employees there suffer through is too much and they can't be bothered with any
work-related business emails over their long weekends.

And
French entitlement has gotten a foothold in the U.S. Many people here believe
the government should take care of them.

Take a
moment and think about why you must have five days to work and take the weekend
off regardless of your personal finances. If I were making $60,000 a year, I would
not be content working eight hours at a job that I leave at 5:00 pm.

You
have to get your
hustle on to get your financial freedom. Of course it's not just
about the hustle, you need , too. But the biggest obstacle of many is the
entitlement mentality.

Rather than seeking comfort and leisure, you should be trying
to achieve greatness. Other management gurus, like Peter Drucker, have
suggested as much. Aristotle certainly agreed. Achievement brings a state of
happiness that is quite different from the one gained by indulging in decadent
pursuits.

In America, people are getting duped into thinking that they
ought to be seeking work/life balance. They get duped into thinking that
happiness means flourishing. They get duped into thinking that they should not
be seeking greatness, but should get on the road to meaning… thus to telling
cute stories about themselves.

Cardone is correct to warn people against the right to laziness. It points the
way toward mediocrity. However meaningful your life, however much you think you
are flourishing, you do better to work harder and to achieve greatness.

6 comments:

Stuart: All workers now have the right to ignore company emails when they are not on the job.

It does sound like a curious right. And does your employer have the right to give smaller raises to employees who exercise this right?

I don't know if laziness is the right way of characterizing the dangers here. Myself, I set an old-fashioned limit by refusing to have a cell/smart phone, so when I'm not by a phone or computer, no one can contact me.

Certainly we all have to learn how we want to set limits in our ever-connected world. And even if we have a "right" to say no, most of us hold some pride in our jobs and knowledge, and its hard to say no to simple requests that make us feel smart and knowledgeable. And you can abuse endless small distractions from other things you don't really want to deal with.

On "saying no", the lesson I learned over a decade ago when I helped out on email software support is that if you replied too quickly to one question, clients would come back with a long string of questions, often ones that they could answer for themselves by using existing documentation. So the trick is simply to wait until the next morning before replying to a second email on an independent question, and then, at least on simple things, say something like "I apologize for not getting back to you on this immediately. Did you figure it out?" And perhaps 90% of the time, they solved it on their own.

Of course I also applied this lesson to myself, and I'm more careful to prioritize my requests, and not ask things unless I've spent some time trying to figure it out on my own first.

So setting limits can create the opposite of laziness - it encourages autonomy and self-confidence to solve problems on your own.

During my late-career stint as owner/CEO of a successful technical consulting firm, I tended to quietly celebrate when my competitors chose to do things "for" their employees that diminished productivity.

Most of French export trade is with other EU-nik partners that share their bizarre views on labor law, so I don't suppose the government regulators have much to worry about beyond lowering living standards for their own citizens, but self-inflicted productivity hits are always unreservedly good news for their American competitors.

"On "saying no", the lesson I learned over a decade ago when I helped out on email software support is that if you replied too quickly to one question, clients would come back with a long string of questions, often ones that they could answer for themselves by using existing documentation. So the trick is simply to wait until the next morning before replying to a second email on an independent question, and then, at least on simple things, say something like "I apologize for not getting back to you on this immediately. Did you figure it out?" And perhaps 90% of the time, they solved it on their own."

I agree that the above works as I do it. I have to establish pretty clear boundaries for communication as it's a constant form of bombardment and can be very draining if one doesn't know how to manage a client base and personalities.

'Work/life balance" is a trap. It is not an objective distinction. Everyone's conception of it is different. We're human beings.

Here's a novel idea: make a choice, and be responsible for the consequences. Making Western labor markets more Byzantine and inefficient guarantees more automation, which may mean fewer choices for employment (depending on demand for your skill set). If you drive up the cost of labor, business leaders will seek alternatives.

There's no free lunch. If I decide I want to go to Disney World tomorrow through conventional channels with no advance planning, I'll pay through the nose. I may not feel good about that, but is it somehow unfair? Who's talkin' fair? Does the world somehow owe me a Disney vacation? Really?

If you want to be left alone outside business hours, ask for it... maybe even demand it if it's that important to you. Just be responsible for the consequences. Stand for what you believe. Not because it feels good or is a trendy Millenial thing to demand someone else do for you, but because it's a boundary around the life you want to lead. It's the lifestyle you've chosen. If they choose to fire you, then you know where things stand. Everything is clear.

Your desires do not impose a duty on someone else. I see this is getting harder and harder for people to comprehend. Just because you want it isn't good enough, because the other party is seeking something in the exchange as well.

A job is not a right that serves your will, nor a vehicle to fulfill your dreams. Employment is based on free exchange.

The "make a law" crowd has no idea what they're creating: incentives to seek alternatives -- more rules, regulations and policies pancaking one after another. Making a law does not solve the dilemma.

Make a choice instead of trying to use government to limit someone else's choices. Show some courage.

There is simply no standard for this subjective notion of "work/life balance." Everyone has a different understanding, just as each person has different desires.

The increasing threats to "at will" employment are dangerous for everyone. You have a right to choose your own life, but you don't live in a vacuum. Others get to choose their path and their conditions of satisfaction, too.

The world does not revolve around you. Please stop mandating your vision of the ideal lifestyle on the rest of us. There are still a fair number of us out here who value liberty over security because freedom allows us to feel ALIVE! We are not victims.